Escape Rooms, The Jumanji Sequel and Hollywood's Eternal Interest In Expanding The Experience

I have been working on a theory that if you talk about an event longer than the event itself, it was likely be very good. My daughter recently saw the new screen version of Murder on the Orient Express and she has been talking about it for hours. Executives in Hollywood also think along those lines. Here is a deeper dive into the connection.

We just brought the family to our first escape room experience, and we are still talking about our visit to Enigma HQ. Unlike what I know about other escape rooms, the Enigma HQ experience was not about being locked in a room. It was more about solving a series of puzzles within a relatively coherent plot line, in this case entitled “The Lazarus Crystal.” We had a great time, collaborating on the clues that were provided on paper, on screen and through audio clips.

As I talked over the experience with the participants, I realize the overlap between escape rooms and Hollywood seems logical.

The recent remake of Jumanji was on track to be a blockbuster by Christmas Day. As of this writing, Jumanji: Welcome to the Junglehas become Sony’s third biggest worldwide release ever with $881.8M to pass bothSpectre and Spider-Man: Homecoming, according to Deadline. Jumanji will likely become the studio’s second biggest release, and it has has now outgrossed all superhero movies released in 2017 on a worldwide basis. (For the home video release, the studio is promising the first ever augmented reality packaging, via Snapchat).

Every studio thirsts to be propped up by strong brands and indeed Jumanji is spawning a slew of ancillary revenue streams including a mobile game by NHN, an Avatar Labs/Facebook Creative/Sony Oculus VR experience, apparel from Hybrid and Isaac Morris, Funko Pop figures, the original board game from Cardinal, and a 60Out Escape Room. As reported by Deadline, the latter is literally a chain of live game facilities in Los Angeles and Philadelphia whereby participants for a $35-$38 admission price can solve puzzles and survive in the wild on Jumanji-like sets at locations.

The key to any game design is to make the game easy to get into but difficult to master. The interesting thing about an escape room unlike other games and unlike other destinations (ranging from restaurants to bowling alleys to miniature golf to libraries, galleries or go kart tracks) is that once you do a specific escape room you really do not want to revisit. Therefore, the escape room business model is fraught with a critical limiting factor.

As with other destination entertainment venues, expanding the customer base is key for the escape room. In fact, it is probably the prime directive. Therefore, word-of-mouth about a satisfying escape room is critical to success.

I took the family to another escape room. I spoke with a couple of the designers at The Exit Game. Building a successful escape room can often take months, they confirmed. “There needs to be a certain ebb and flow to the game play. Certain large payoffs need to be balanced with smaller more readily accessible solutions.” That quotation could have come from a Hollywood script writer's room. Some escape rooms are very simple whereas others involve adjoining rooms, or in the case of The Exit Game actual tunnels that require accessing keys and solving puzzles to open doors and gates.